The History of Parliament Trust REVIEW OF ACTIVITIES IN THE YEAR 2013-14

Randolph Churchill campaigning in Devonport Dockyard during the General Election campaign of 1950. Reproduced by kind permission of Plymouth and West Devon Record Office.

- 1 - Objectives and Activities of the History of Parliament Trust

The History of Parliament is a major academic project to create a scholarly reference work describing the members, constituencies and activities of the Parliament of and the . The volumes either published or in preparation cover the House of Commons from 1386 to 1868 and the House of Lords from 1603 to 1832. They are widely regarded as an unparalleled source for British political, social and local history.

The volumes consist of detailed studies of elections and electoral politics in each constituency, and of closely researched accounts of the lives of everyone who was elected to Parliament in the period, together with surveys drawing out the themes and discoveries of the research and adding information on the operation of Parliament as an institution.

The History has published 21,420 biographies and 2,831 constituency surveys in ten sets of volumes (41 volumes in all). They deal with 1386-1421, 1509-1558, 1558-1603, 1604- 29, 1660-1690, 1690-1715, 1715-1754, 1754-1790, 1790-1820 and 1820-32. All of these articles are now available on www.historyofparliamentonline.org . The History’s staff of professional historians is currently researching the House of Commons in the periods 1422-1504, 1640-1660, and 1832-1868, and the House of Lords in the periods 1603-60 and 1660-1832. The three Commons projects currently in progress will contain a further 7,251 biographies of members of the House of Commons and 861 constituency surveys. With what is now published and in progress, the History covers 414 years of the history of the House of Commons. In addition, the House of Lords projects are currently working on 693 biographies covering 1660-1715, and 458 covering 1603-1660.

Since 1995, the History has been funded principally by the two Houses of Parliament. It is based close to its original host, the Institute of Historical Research, University of . It was founded before the Second World War, the brainchild of Josiah Wedgwood MP, a Labour parliamentarian and minister, and revived after the war when a number of the greatest British historians of the day, including Sir Lewis Namier, Sir Frank Stenton and Sir John Neale, were involved in its re-establishment. The project is governed by its Trustees, who are mainly Members and Officers of both Houses of Parliament. The quality of the project's research and writing is monitored by an Editorial Board of historians. For further details see the History’s website at www.historyofparliamentonline.org.

- 2 -

Review of activities in the year 2013-14

HIGHLIGHTS

Research

 Over the year, the History’s staff and some external authors compiled new articles, containing over million words, and revised. One project is approaching publication in 2015, with two more now almost completely concerned with revision of past articles in preparation for publication.  At the end of the second full year of the oral history project there are more than 100 completed interviews with former Members of Parliament, with more than half of them deposited and available to the public in the British Library. The project was marked with an exhibition of portraits of some of the interviewees in Portcullis House.  The History obtained a grant of over £50,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to undertake an oral history project collecting memories of constituency politics in Devon since 1945: the project was well underway by the end of the year.

Dissemination Programme

 The History of Parliament Online continues to attract high numbers of hits. New sections have been added for schools (including material which will enable schools to use the History more effectively) and for the oral history project  The History’s blogs and Twitter accounts are now attracting a large number of followers, directing attention to the material on the website, both previously published and new articles.

Outreach and Engagement Programme

 New academic collaborations in which the History was involved included the JISC- funded DiLiPad project, together with King’s College, London, the Institute of Historical Research and the Universities of Toronto and Amsterdam, concerned with the digitisation of parliamentary material; and the AHRC-Funded 'St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster: Visual and Political Culture, 1292-1941’.  The History was a partner in a conference at Oxford on ‘Writing the History of Parliament’, and held a highly successful colloquium on ‘State Formation and the ’ at Bloomsbury Square.  The History’s regular annual lecture has continued to be popular, and entries to its annual competitions for schools have grown in number thanks to the new pages on the website specifically aimed at schools.

- 3 - RESEARCH PROGRAMME

With several of our projects now well into their revision phase, checking articles for final publication, the overall output of the History in terms of new articles and draft articles has gone down; but revision of pieces which in many cases were written a long time ago remains a substantial exercise. Altogether, the History’s staff and some external authors compiled 269 new articles, containing over a million words, and revised 1016 old ones. Below we describe some of the work that has emerged from each of the projects.

The House of Commons, 1422-1461

This is one of the sections now actively revising articles for publication, its four staff completing 626 revisions, although they also wrote 9 new articles comprising over 28,000 words.

Among the new pieces was Sir John Saville (d.1482), who sat for in 1450 and 1467, and was a leading retainer of the duke of . The article shows how his dispute with an assertive new neighbour, Sir John Pilkington, brought serious disorder to Yorkshire in 1478 and how royal patronage could distort local power structures. Sir Robert Waterton (d.1475), son of a friend of Henry IV, looked destined for a prominent and successful career until the mid 1440s when he lost all his offices. He lived for another 30 years and it is probable that he suffered some sort of mental or physical collapse. One of the constituencies completed, Yorkshire, was the only county that maintained the tradition of returning only knights, perhaps to reduce competition for seats in a county with a large number of gentry qualified to sit by wealth. Many of its MPs took an active role in the civil war of 1459-61, mostly on the side of the and the Nevilles.

The section also benefited from the work of Matthew Smith, a second year undergraduate history student from Royal Holloway College, University of London, who was attached to the section as an intern for a period of four weeks in July and August 2013. In consultation with the National Archives, he collated the National Archives’ catalogue listing of wills enrolled in the registers of the Prerogative Court of the archbishops of Canterbury (TNA class PROB11) with the older, and more reliable, lists published by the Harleian Society in the 19th century. He created an EXCEL spread-sheet covering the first four registers for the period 1383- 1460, encompassing some 2,200 individual entries. This spread-sheet has been added to the section’s repository of lists and indexes, and has also been made available to the National Archives for inclusion in its on-line catalogue.

The House of Commons, 1640-1660

This section is also engaged principally in revising articles for publication, though they are also writing some of the most important of the members of the period, including John Pym. The section’s five staff completed 124 revisions over the year, and 6 new articles, comprising over 91,000 words. Among them were several of our articles on the powerful executive committees which handled business on behalf of the Long Parliament, such as The Committee for Advance of Money, established in November 1642 to provide ready money for the parliamentarian army through contributions and fines for those who defaulted. Under the chairmanship of William Strode I it played an important role in funding the army of the of Essex until April 1645. Later it became the fiefdom of the corrupt Independent politician, Lord Howard of Escrick. Among the Members who were completed during the period was Henry Marten, returned for Berkshire in 1640, the most openly republican member of the Long Parliament, expelled from the Commons in 1643 for vilifying the royal family, later an ally of the Levellers and leader of the radical Independents at Westminster, a and one of the steersmen of the . Another was Thomas Scot, a

- 4 - ‘recruiter’ for Aylesbury, and a highly active member of the Commons and the Independent faction during the later 1640s. A regicide, he assumed the role of the Rump’s de facto secretary of state, with responsibility for managing its intelligence system, and was a key figure also in the Rump’s foreign policy in 1649-53 and 1659

The House of Commons, 1832-68

The five staff of the House of Commons 1832-68 section together with a growing number of external contributors produced 213 articles during the year, containing well over half a million words. Among the biographies and constituency articles were the following:

John Benbow (1769-1855) was a septuagenarian attorney, whose claim to be independent of ‘any ministry or any party of men’ was qualified by his dependence on the patronage of the borough’s owner, Lord Ward. His votes were influenced by the shifting political allegiances of his eccentric and impulsive patron determined by his quest for an earldom. Francis Richard Haggitt (afterwards Wegg-Prosser) (1824-1911) eloquently opposed anti- Catholic legislation and spoke in favour of admitting Jews to the House of Commons. He retired from the House of Commons in 1852, converted to the Roman faith and became a leading patron of the Catholic revival, founding a Benedictine monastery at Belmont Abbey. Samuel Morton Peto (1809-1889), the Victorian ‘railway gambler par excellence’, was best known for his colourful career as a contractor for railways and public works, which included the new Houses of Parliament. By 1866 the extent of his questionable financial practices as a contractor had been exposed, and following his bankruptcy he resigned from the Commons in April 1868. Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-39), the noted poet, wit and journalist, indelibly associated with , re-entered the Commons as Tory MP for Great Yarmouth in 1835, but struggled to regain his earlier standing in debate as a leading anti-reformer, possibly owing to the tuberculosis which killed him in 1839. Sir George Henry Rose (1770-1855), regarded as an ‘intolerable bore’ by George Agar Ellis, was one of the last holders of an inherited sinecure office to sit in the Commons, where he was nominal clerk of the parliaments with a salary of £3,300 a year, until he resigned both seat and office in 1844 to concentrate on writing studies of the Old Testament. Henry Drummond (1786- 1860), an eccentric paternalistic, prolific writer and leader of a millenarian sect, returned to the Commons as MP for West in 1847 after a break of almost 35 years, ostensibly as a ‘No-Popery’ Protectionist. His speeches guaranteed a packed House, being ‘full of humour and sarcasm, learning and folly, boldness and timidity, bigotry and charity’. Charles Carroll MacTavish (1818-1868) was the scion of a prominent Irish-American family long established in Maryland, whose eligibility to sit in Parliament rested on his father’s status as a British subject. Sir Edward Burtenshaw Sugden (1781-1875) was the son of a London hairdresser, who rose to prominence through his legal expertise in the court of chancery, and served as Irish , 1834-5, although he mooted resignation over the question of whether his wife (who was his former kitchen-maid) would be received at court. He eventually became lord chancellor of England and one of ‘the most effective judges and law reformers of his age’. Edward Howes (1813-1871) was praised by The Illustrated London News as ‘one of the essentially business members’ who were ‘the wheel of the Parliamentary machine’. Aubrey William de Vere Beauclerk (1801-54), a half-pay army major and son of a Foxite Whig MP, has attracted interest because of his long-term intimacy with the authoress Mary Shelley. The father of six legitimate children by two much younger wives and illegitimate children by other women, Beauclerk became associated with the so-called ‘philosophic radicals’ in the heady days of parliamentary reform, and sat as an active, if not terribly effective, radical MP for East Surrey from 1832-7.

Leominster provides a rare example of a borough that came under family influence after the 1832 Reform Act. The dwindling electorate led to the terminal decline of a once vibrant and colourful political culture, distinguished by communal participation and bribery, to one where

- 5 - the representation was controlled by the Tory Arkwright family, of Hampton Court, aided by influential local attorneys. Suffolk East, a double member constituency created by the 1832 Reform Act, was ‘one of the most extensive agricultural districts in the empire’. The East Suffolk Agricultural Society, whose committee contained the leaders of local Conservatism, loomed large in county life and ensured that rural issues, particularly the malt tax, took centre stage in parliamentary elections. Pontefract, a Yorkshire agricultural borough renowned for the production of liquorice, retained a high proportion of ‘ancient rights’ voters throughout this period. This in part explained its reputation as one of the ‘most corrupt holes in the kingdom’, with electors reluctant to relinquish the traditional payments of ‘head- money’. The borough therefore attracted a string of wealthy outsiders as candidates, with John Gully, a former boxing champion and a leading figure on the turf, sitting as MP from 1832-7. Ripon, a small but prosperous town at the centre of an agricultural district, had been a burgage borough before 1832, with its representation firmly under the control of the major local proprietor, Elizabeth Lawrence, of Studley Royal. Although her Tory nominees were defeated in 1832, she reasserted her influence thereafter, in part through the creation of ‘cow-house’ votes.

The House of Lords, 1603-1660

The four members of the section produced 45 biographies totalling over 273,000 words. They included the following articles:

Robert Devereux, 3rd (1591-1646), son of the popular Elizabethan favourite, executed for treason, was restored to the family estates and titles in 1604. His first marriage was annulled in 1613 on the grounds of his impotence, though he himself doubted the legality of the proceedings. He saw military service in the 1620s in Germany, the Netherlands and at Cadiz, became an opponent of the duke of Buckingham, refused to pay the 1627 Forced Loan and supported the Petition of Right in 1628. During the early stages of the Civil War he commanded the Parliamentarian army. Henry Mordaunt, 4th Lord Mordaunt (c.1568-1609) was a Catholic peer suspiciously absent from Parliament when the Gunpowder Plot was discovered on 5 Nov. 1605. Subsequently imprisoned in the Tower he was prosecuted in Star Chamber and fined 10,000 marks (never paid). Thomas Arundel, 1st Lord Arundell of Wardour (c.1560-1639) a brave soldier and staunch Catholic, was made an Imperial Count for his exploits against the Turks, though at home he offended successive monarchs and alienated his friends through arrogance and political maladroitness. His public career effectively ended by a diplomatic incident in 1605, he devoted his later years to devising dubious money-making schemes, and died heavily in debt. John Roper, 1st Lord Teynham (c.1534-1618) was a conforming Catholic who held a highly lucrative clerkship in King’s Bench, and relentlessly sought a peerage for ten years, finally securing a barony at the age of 82 in return for his office and £10,000. Thomas Howard, 21st (or 14th) earl of Arundel (1585-1646), well known as an unrivalled connoisseur and patron of the arts, was the premier earl in England, who sought to recover his family’s lost estates and pre- eminence. As a member of the Lords, his chief claim to fame is procedural: the Standing Orders of 1621 were almost certainly his handiwork, making him in some sense the father of the modern House. Lionel Cranfield, 1st earl of Middlesex (1575-1645) was the only financier to serve as lord treasurer before the Civil War, who made his reputation as a reformer of Crown finances in the . In December 1620 he married a cousin of the favourite, Buckingham, and secured a peerage and the treasurership in 1621. His rigorous cost-cutting offended many courtiers, including Buckingham, and in 1624 his opposition to war with Spain, and a foolish attempt to oust the favourite, led Prince Charles and Buckingham to promote his impeachment. Henry Berkeley, 7th Lord Berkeley (1534-1613), in early life one of England’s richest men, inherited his title at birth, but squandered his patrimony through extravagance, incessant lawsuits, and political misfortune. He died from a surfeit of ‘small custards’. Edward Vaux, 4th Lord Vaux of Harrowden (1588-1661) inherited

- 6 - his barony aged six, and was raised a Catholic. Briefly implicated in the Gunpowder Plot, he was imprisoned and temporarily stripped of his estates in 1611 for refusing the oath of allegiance. Following a short-lived military career, fighting for the Habsburgs in the Netherlands, he spent his later life in retirement. A notorious adulterer, Vaux finally swore allegiance to Charles I in 1626 in order to obtain parliamentary privilege, thereby evading a Star Chamber suit brought against him for assaulting a deputy lieutenant. Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury (1563-1612), the dominant figure on the Council since the late 1590s, became, in effect, chief minister to James I on the latter’s accession in 1603. Extraordinarily hardworking, yet prone to ill health, Cecil was given the impossible tasks of steering the Union through Parliament and rescuing the royal finances.

Among the bishops completed during the period, Theophilus Field, (1575-1636), the son of Elizabethan London’s leading presybterian preacher, was a venal conformist who paid the duke of Buckingham for the bishopric of Llandaff in 1619. His search for funds almost resulted in his impeachment two years later. , (1562-1640) was the most skilful politician of the early Stuart church, without whom Laudianism would have been inconceivable. Appointed in 1603, he was subsequently preferred by James I to four bishoprics. His followers, the ‘Durham House’ group, supported the Spanish Match, and from 1624 attached themselves to Prince Charles and Buckingham. Passed over for Canterbury, he was sent to York, where he died in 1640. , (c.1545-1608) was a precocious scholar and notable preacher who served as the master of two Cambridge colleges, and Lady Margaret professor of divinity, prior to entering the episcopate, where he grew rich through the profits of lead mining, and died leaving an extensive property portfolio.

The House of Lords, 1660-1715

This section is planning publication in 2015, and is therefore engaged mainly on revising articles, although five major new biographies were completed, totalling 114,000 words. They included , , the well-connected member of a cadet branch of the family of the Finch of Winchilsea, who made his name as a lawyer, and ultimately was promoted to a peerage and the office of lord chancellor, playing an important role in the development of equity. George Savile, marquess of Halifax, one of the leading statesmen of the Restoration and Revolution, was famous for helping defeat the Exclusion Bill, for overseeing the transfer of the crown to William of Orange, and for his many political pamphlets, including the ‘Character of a Trimmer’.

Two interns worked with the section over the summer: Alex Locock Harrison (St Andrews University) and Edward Hicks (Oxford University), provided substantial help to the section, in particular in the creation of a database of portraits of members of the House of Lords in the period.

The Oral History Project

The History began working with volunteer interviewers on creating an oral history of parliament and parliamentarians in late 2011. The project will create a sound archive of people involved in politics at national and constituency level, and will provide a unique record of post-2nd World War British political history. The project’s aim is to interview as many former Members of the House of Commons as possible, focusing on how people came to be Members, how they worked within the constituency and in Parliament for their constituency and for the particular causes in which they were interested, and what were their impressions of parliament and political life. The interviewers are volunteers, many of them historians of contemporary British politics, all of them trained by the British Library in the techniques of oral history interviewing. The project is being managed by a volunteer, Dr Priscila Pivatto.

- 7 - We are very pleased to have had the continuing support of Dods, who are sponsoring the project, now in its third year.

By the end of the 2013-14 period we had invited 262 former Members to participate in the project. 160 had agreed to be interviewed, and a total of 94 interviews had been completed, with 19 in progress, making a total of 113. We hope to reach 150 interviews by the end of 2014. 57 interviews have now been deposited with the British Library. Of the 94 fully completed interviews, 80 are with men and 14 with women. They include 43 Conservatives, 41 Labour, 5 Liberal Democrats and 5 SDP (party as at exit from the House). 72 were born before 1939, 22 afterwards.

We have trained a total of 40 interviewers, recruited mainly among people with some knowledge or expertise in British History or politics. Of those, 25 are currently active. We held our fourth seminar for interviewers at 18 Bloomsbury Square on 17 January, combining a feedback session for existing interviewers with a training session for new ones.

A separate section for the project has been created on The History of Parliament website, including short biographies of the former MPs, recent photos, a complete summary of each interview and sound clips. We are planning to expand these to cover recent interviews, as well as to provide some thematic material. At the start of the Project, Dods commissioned photographer Waller-Bridge to create portraits of some of our interviewees. An exhibition, facilitated by the Speaker's Advisory Committee on Works of Art, of a selection of these photographic portraits was held in Portcullis House from 15th April - 2 May 2013, and many of the sitters, and those who interviewed them, were able to join us at an accompanying event in Westminster.

The oral history project was featured on BBC Radio 4’s 'Archive on 4' on Saturday 18th May, linking the project to Josiah Wedgwood’s questionnaires and biographies of the 1930s. Presented by Matthew Parris and produced by Mike Greenwood, it included extracts from several of our oral history interviews, as well as digging into the surviving questionnaires from our archives, comparing the experience of being an MP in the 1930s and in the 1950s, 1960s and later.

From the Grassroots: An Oral History of Community Politics in Devon

In July 2013 we were awarded a grant of £53,400 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to undertake an oral history project on local political life in Devon. The project, ‘From the Grassroots’, will go beyond our current oral history project and widen the range of interviewees to include not just MPs but also the county’s political activists. The main intention is to create a new oral history archive from these interviews, but also to share the results on a website, through a programme of events and in an exhibition (the project website is currently being developed at www.historyofparliamentonline.org/from-the- grassroots). We are working closely with partners in the region (the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter, the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, and the Universities of Plymouth and Exeter) to undertake the project, which began in October 2013 and will continue until April 2015. The project also received support from a number of local MPs, in particular Dr Sarah Wollaston, Ben Bradshaw and Oliver Colville.

We appointed a part-time coordinator to run the project, based at the Devon Heritage Centre. Dr Kayleigh Milden has a PhD on the political history of Methodism in Devon and , 1918-2000, from the University of Exeter. She has since coordinated six oral history projects in the region (several also funded by the HLF), is the oral history society’s regional representative for the South West and has published on both oral history methodology and the region’s history.

- 8 - We launched the project on 20th January at the Devon Heritage Centre, Exeter. Around fifty attended, as well as the local press and Simon Timms, the chair of the HLF in the South West. During the event we introduced the new project, Professor Kevin Jefferys (University of Plymouth) gave a lecture on the 1945 election in Devon, and we presented a selection of archive film footage and audio extracts relating to Devon.

By April 2014, 26 project volunteers had been trained in oral history. The volunteer team consists of history and politics students from the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth; former and current party activists, and professionals (still working and retired) with an interest in political history. The project has a target of 70 oral history recordings and a good start has been made. Interviewees come from all major (and some minor) parties, including former Liberal Councillors David and Joan Morrish, who have over 70 years of service on Exeter City and Devon County Councils; former Conservative Councillor Jeff Coates, whose interview includes his recollections of youth activism in Devon during the late 1960s; and Christopher and Mary Chesney, Labour Party activists in the Exeter and Tiverton area for over 40 years.

If successful we intend to use the results of this project in further bids to the HLF to expand the project across the country.

Parliamentary Proceedings of 1624

The History has been continuing its work on the completion of the Yale Center for Parliamentary History’s unfinished project to publish the parliamentary proceedings of the 1624 Parliament. The 1624 Parliament is the only Parliament of the early seventeenth century whose proceedings have not been edited and published by the (now defunct) Yale Center for Parliamentary History. When it was wound up, the Center sent the History of Parliament Trust its remaining funds and research materials relating to the 1624 project, on which work had been undertaken in the 1970s. The History committed itself to completing the edition on the basis of this material, and successfully bid for a Leverhulme Foundation Grant of £97,000 in order to do so. Philip Baker was appointed research assistant for the project and commenced work in January 2012. The staff of the History of Parliament’s 1603- 60 House of Lords project are also heavily involved, led by Dr Andrew Thrush, who oversees the project on a day-to-day basis.

The 1624 Parliament sat for 79 days between 12 February and 29 May 1624. In addition to the journals of the House of Commons and House of Lords, its proceedings are reported in several diaries compiled by individual Members. These will form the backbone of the edition, which will also include editorial notes, apparatus and, ideally, a large amount of other material related to the Parliament, such as bills and correspondence.

43 days’ proceedings had been completed by the end of the year. The text edited to date now stands at over 504,000 words. We have now passed the halfway point, both in terms of overall number of days to be edited but also (and more importantly) in terms of overall word length (estimated at c. 770,000 words). Basic editing of the proceedings for 1624 is now complete. These proceedings are, by a considerable margin, the longest of the entire Parliament. Of the remaining unedited files, only eight are greater than 10,000 words in length, whereas hitherto files of 20,000 and even 30,000 words have not been uncommon. Some delay has occurred to the project as a result of discovering a number of problems with the existing text; it has been agreed that the project will continue beyond its original completion date using the legacy funding received from Yale.

- 9 - DISSEMINATION PROGRAMME

History of Parliament Online

Two new sections were added to our website this year. We launched a new section on the oral history project (www.historyofparliamentonline.org/research/oral-history) in conjunction with the exhibition of photographs held in the Palace of Westminster in April 2013. This currently includes profiles of 18 of our interviewees, each with Michael Waller-Bridge’s portrait photograph, a short biography and audio extracts from their interviews. We hope to expand this section in the coming year. We also published an expanded ‘schools’ section (http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/schools), including articles specially written for children at Key Stage Three (for more see below). This section has to date been very popular.

The website continues to be well-used, averaging around 34,000 visits a month from nearly 23,000 people. Most of our visitors viewed individual articles in the ‘Research’ sections, but they also viewed ‘About’ and ‘Explore’ articles. Most traffic is direct, but we also receive a number of referrals from Wikipedia, Connected Histories and social media.

Social Media and Blogs

The History has a wordpress blog, a twitter account and facebook page. In addition, the 1832-68 section manage their own blog and twitter account, and the Director has his own blog. Our presence on social media has continued to grow. Twitter followers increased during the year from just over 1,000 to nearly 3,000, and although we continue to tweet on historical or current events daily, we have also undertaken two series of ‘live tweets’ highlighting historical events. In October and November we tweeted a series of quotations from each day of the Putney debates, and in January we published a series of quotations from every day of the trial of Charles I (the accompanying blog ‘The Trial of Charles I: an Early Modern Show Trial?’ by Phil Baker was one of the most popular posts of the year). We also have a small but active following on Facebook.

Traffic on our blog has increased, averaging around 1,500 views per month with a high of 2,014 in January. We post on historical subjects, often with topical significance, as well reports on our events and activities. Popular blogs this year include: ‘The ‘warming-pan baby’: James Edward Francis Stuart’ (Charles Littleton) published after the birth of Prince George; ‘Thanks for our bank holidays, “Saint” John…’ on the life of Sir John Lubbock (Kathryn Rix); ‘Women in Democracy during the 1970s and 1980s (Emma Peplow); ‘The Treaty of Paris, John Wilkes and North Briton Number 45’ (Robin Eagles); and ‘Parliament and Christmas during the Civil War’ by Stephen Roberts. The Victorian Commons also publish weekly, averaging around a thousand views a month, on subjects such as elections before the secret ballot and Victorian female franchise, as well as the popular ‘MP of the month’ series.

OUTREACH AND ENGAGEMENT PROGRAMME

Competitions

The ‘schools’ section of the website (see above) now includes a series of materials on the Reformation, a topic covered in Key Stage Three (11-14 year olds) history. We have published over 30 articles for schools on Tudor Parliaments, MPs and Constituencies based on our research, and created, with the help of a former member of the Department of Education, a set of learning activities and eight activity sheets for teachers to use in classes. The webpages have been designed to ensure that they both appeal to children and are

- 10 - easily distinguishable from our academic materials. The Historical Association and Parliament’s Education Service have praised the appearance and content of the website, and both organisations have promoted it. We have had a steady number of views of these materials, and hope to add more topics in future.

This year we decided to move the deadline for our ‘A’ level competition to the end of September to allow children sitting exams in the summer to also take part. Again we asked for essays on British or Irish parliamentary history. It was won by James Heale of Kingston Grammar School, who entered with ‘To what extent have backbench groups influenced the personalities and policies of the Conservative Party, 1945-75?’. Our Key Stage Three competition was based on the Reformation, and we received over 50 entries, a considerable increase on 2012. The standard was very high, and the trustees decided on two joint winners: Jessica Welchman of Fairlands Middle School, Somerset and Ami Ganatra of Leicester Grammar School. We held the prize day for all our winners in Parliament on 26 February. The winners, their teachers and families were given a tour of parliament before being presented with their prizes by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Rt. Hon. MP.

We received eight entries for our dissertation competition (for the best undergraduate thesis written on British or Irish parliamentary history up to 1979). Jonathan Hayes (Queens, Belfast) won the competition with a thorough and engaging piece of research, ‘The best that can be done under the circumstances' or 'an insult to the gallant dead'? The organisation and effectiveness of war pensions administration in Northern , 1921-39’. The judges were particularly struck by its use of archival sources.

Parliamentary activities

After our 2012 lecture was postponed due to Hurricane Sandy, we held two lectures in 2013, both at the Atlee Suite, Portcullis House. Amanda Foreman’s postponed lecture, ‘How to make friends and corrupt people: The Confederate Infiltration of Parliament during the American Civil War, 1861-65’ took place on 5 June 2013 and was very well attended. Baroness Patricia Hollis gave this year’s scheduled lecture on 6 November on ‘The hopes of the suffragettes: were they realised?’ Another well-attended event, it was also broadcast on BBC Parliament.

Dr Robin Eagles, Senior Research Fellow on the Lords 1660-1832 project, gave a lecture in the Macmillan Room, Portcullis House, Westminster titled ‘John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty?’ on 26 March. The lecture was part of a programme to mark the 250th anniversary of Wilkes’ expulsion from the House of Commons for seditious libel, and was accompanied by an exhibition on Wilkes, co-curated by Dr Eagles, using materials from the Parliamentary Collections.

We have been working closely with Parliament’s Public Engagement and Learning team, who are planning a number of events in 2015 to mark the 800th anniversary of , the 750th anniversary of Simon de Montfort’s parliament and a number of other anniversaries (including the battles of Agincourt and Waterloo and the death of ). We are involved in several anniversary projects, and this year we were commissioned to prepare a timeline of major events in the development of parliament and democracy. This timeline will be the basis for a number of different projects, both in Westminster and online.

Academic collaborations

A meeting was held in February to start off the Digging into Linked Parliamentary Data (DiLiPaD) project funded by JISC, which the History initiated and in which it is a partner

- 11 - with the IHR and the Universities of Toronto and Amsterdam and Kings College London. The project is designed to link speakers to available biographies of members of parliament and government in specialized biographical databases, as well as the Wikipedia / DBpedia / Linked Open Data cloud, and to deliver a common format for encoding parliamentary proceedings appropriate for the UK, Dutch and Canadian Hansards; a joint dataset covering all three jurisdictions; a ‘workbench’ with a range of Natural Language Processing tools for the comparative, longitudinal study of parliamentary data; and extensive substantive case studies focusing on immigration and parliamentary language, which will showcase the new research opportunities. Although no financial benefit comes to the History, the project will provide ways in which we can begin to build links between the History’s biographies and the online Hansard data.

The ‘Writing the History of Parliament’ colloquium, put on by the Centre for Early Modern British and Irish History at the with the support of the History, took place at Jesus College, Oxford, on Saturday 20th April. The colloquium was designed to explore the rise of parliament in the historical imagination in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Paul Seaward and Simon Healy gave papers, as well as former research fellow Jason Peacey. Several other members of the History’s staff attended, as did one of our Trustees.

The 1640-60 section held a successful colloquium on Saturday 18 May at 18 Bloomsbury Square on ‘State Formation and the Long Parliament’, which attracted many prominent scholars of seventeenth century British politics. History of Parliament speakers were Philip Baker, Vivienne Larminie, Patrick Little, Stephen Roberts and David Scott.

The History has continued its involvement in the network of European Parliamentary Historians (EuParl.net). Partners besides the History include the Montesquieu Institute (a state-funded collaboration between a number of universities in the Netherlands), the Centrum voor Parlementaire Geschiedenis at the University of Nijmegen and the Kommission für Geschichte des Parliamentarismus und der Politischen Partien (Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and political parties), which is funded by and works closely with the German Bundestag, the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, and the Comité d’histoire parlementaire et politique in France, which works with the Sénat. The network met in the margins of a conference sponsored by the Dutch research funding body, NWO, in the Hague at the end of May, and though the meeting was overshadowed by news of the withdrawal of an annual government grant (subsequently substantially reversed) from our Dutch partners, the Centrum voor Parlementaire Geschiedenis, it developed a proposal to the European Commission for funding for a series of related projects. Although this proved unsuccessful, it is hoped that it will form the basis of future proposals.

Paul Seaward and Philip Salmon attended a conference at the Weatherhead Center, Harvard University, one result of our collaboration with Harvard and the LSE concerning the nineteenth century House of Commons division lists which the History had previously digitised. Speakers were mainly political scientists, several of them speaking about the use of the division list data and what it had been able to tell them about Victorian politics. While there we discussed with our collaborators the next steps in taking the Harvard/LSE database, developed from the division data and other sources, into the website to become part of the resources available through the 1832-68 section’s work. This project is now underway.

We continued to support the work of two doctorial students based at the Institute of Historical Research, supervised by Miles Taylor, under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Award Scheme. Martin Spychal is working on ‘The Geography of Power: The Role of the Boundary

- 12 - Commissioners in Shaping the Electoral Representation of Britain’, and Rebekah Moore is working on ‘Space and Power in the New Palace of Westminster’.

The History is also involved in an AHRC-funded project of the University of York and Institute of Historical Research in collaboration with the Palace of Westminster, as a member of the Executive Board for the project. The AHRC-funded project 'St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster: Visual and Political Culture, 1292-1941' brings together a team of historians and art historians to research a building which was successively a royal chapel, the House of Commons, and the main entrance to Parliament. The research will feed into a digital reconstruction of St Stephen's in its successive roles, modelled by the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture. The project runs for three years from October 2013.

As mentioned above, we had three undergraduate interns working with us over the summer. Matt Smith, a RHUL undergraduate, worked with the 1422-61 section; Alex Locock Harrison, a history undergraduate at St Andrews, and Edward Hicks, an M.Res. history student at Oxford worked with the House of Lords 1660-1715 section. In addition, we had a sixth form student, Dave Silk, working with us for a few days in July.

Media

The oral history project was featured on BBC Radio 4’s 'Archive on 4' during May (see above), A review of 1604-29 by Nicholas Tyacke published in Parliamentary History used the volumes to pursue a number of historiographical issues about the discussion of and puritanism in relation to early seventeenth century parliaments.

The History of Parliament

June 2014

- 13 - ARTICLES COMPLETED 2013-14

House of Commons 1422-61

9 biographies:

Thomas Derlond: John Keighley: Thomas Parye: Sir John Saville (d.1482), Sir Thomas Saville (d.1449) Sir William Tempest (d.1441) Sir Robert Waterton (d.1475) Thomas Haryngton II

1 constituency:

Yorkshire

626 revisions

House of Commons 1640-60

3 biographies:

Henry Marten: Thomas Scot I : Thomas Pride

3 committees:

The Committee for Advance of Money: Committee for Sequestrations: Committee for Indemnity:

124 revisions

House of Commons 1832-1945

188 biographies:

Mervyn Edward Archdall (1812-1895): Denis William Pack Beresford (1818-1881): George Leopold Bryan (1828-1880): Robert Burrowes (1810-1881): William Curry (1784-1842): Henry John Clements (1781-1843): Conway Richards Dobbs (1795-1886): James Gibson (1804-1880): Lord Claud John Hamilton (1843-1925): Villiers Francis Hatton (1787-1859): Lord Arthur Moyes William Hill (1792-1860William Gillilan Johnson (1808-1886): James Michael Kelly (1808-1875): John McCance (1772-1835): Joseph Myles McDonnell (1796- 1872): Charles Carroll MacTavish (1818-1868): John Maher (1801-1860): Ross Stephenson Moore (1806-1855): William Morris-Reade (1787-1847): Johnson Smyth (1815-1853): George William Barrington (1824-1886): Philip Bennet (1795-1866): Edward Herbert Bunbury (1811-1895): Lord Charles Fitzroy (1791-1865): Edward Greene (1815-1891): Lord Augustus Henry Charles Hervey (1837-1875): Frederick William Hervey, Earl Jermyn I (1800-1864): Frederick William John Hervey, Earl Jermyn II (1834-1907): Sir Edward Kerrison, 1st bt. (1776-1853): Edward Clarence Kerrison (1821-1886): Robert Hart Logan (1772-1838): James Henry Porteus Oakes (1821-1901): Windsor Parker (1802-1892): Robert Rushbrooke (1779-1845): Harry Spencer Waddington (?1781-1864): Edward Akroyd (1810-1887): Samuel Adlam Bayntun (1804-1833): Richard Bethell (1772-1864): Henry Broadley (1793-1851): John Cheetham (1802-1886): Sir George Cockburn (1772-1853): Lord John Hay II (1827-1916): Beaumont Hotham, 3rd Baron Hotham [I] (1794-1870); William John Sawrey Morritt (1813-1874): Thomas Pemberton (1793-1867): Sir Edward Burtenshaw Sugden (1781-1875): Paul Beilby Thompson (1784-1852): Sir James Rivett

- 14 - Carnac (1784-1846): Samuel Crawley (1790-1852): John Minet Fector (1812-68): Joseph Warner Henley (1793-1884): Edward John Hutchins (1809-1876): Wyndham Lewis (1780- 1838): Sir Harry Neale, 2nd bt. (1765-1840): Charles Philip Yorke (1799-1873): Thomas Alcock (1801-66): John Peter Allix (1785-1848): Richard Alsager (1781-1841): Aubrey William de Vere Beauclerk (1801-54): William Wither Bramston Beach (1826-1901): John Ivatt Briscoe (1791-1870): James Henry Callander (1803-1851): Charles Carnegie (1833- 1906): Lord William Henry Hugh Cholmondeley (1800-1884): Henry Combe Compton (1789- 1866): Ralph Heneage Dutton (1821-1892): Henry Edward Hamlyn Fane (1817-1868): Francis William Grant (1814-1840): Edward William Terrick Hamilton (1809-1898): George Hay, earl of Gifford (1822-1862): Edward Howes (1813-1871): Henry Kemble (1787-1857): Sir Jervoise Clarke Jervoise (1804-1889): Lauderdale Maule (1807-1854): Clare Sewell Read (1826-1905): Sir Daniel Keyte Sandford (1798-1838): James Winter Scott (1799- 1873): George Sclater (later Sclater-Booth) (1826-1894): Sir George Thomas Staunton (1781-1859): Lord Charles Wellesley (1808-1858): Hon. James Du Pre Alexander, Viscount Alexander (1812-1855): Mervyn Archdall (1763-1839): Sir Michael Edward Hicks Beach (1837-1916): John Benbow (1769-1855): Lord Arthur Chichester (1808-1840): Maxwell Charles Close (1827-1903): John Lowry Cole (1813-1882): Vesey Dawson (aft. Viscount Cremorne) (1842-1920): John Ellis (1812-?): Hon. John James Knox (1790-1856): Hon. Thomas Knox, Viscount Northland I (1786-1858): Hon. Thomas Knox (aft. Viscount Northland II) (1816-1858): Hon. Randall Edward Plunkett (1804-1852): George Henry Seymour (1818-1869): Sir Hugh Stewart (1792-1854): James Matthew Stronge (1811-1885): Hon. George Frederick Upton (1802-1890): George Arkwright (1807-56): Richard Arkwright (1835-1918): Richard Baggallay (1816-88): Joseph Bailey (1812-50): Sir Joseph Russell Bailey, bt. (1840-1906): Thomas Baskerville Mynors Baskerville (1790-1864): Robert Biddulph (1801-64): Thomas William Booker (afterwards Booker-Blakemore) (1801-58): Daniel Higford Duvall Burr (1811-85): Henry Morgan Clifford (1806-1884): Edward Bolton Clive (1766-1845): Sir Henry Geers Cotterell, bt. (1834-1900): Edward Thomas Foley (1791- 1846): Lord Montague William Graham (1807-78): Charles Greenaway (1784-1859): Francis Richard Haggitt (afterwards Wegg-Prosser) (1824-1911): Charles Spencer Bateman Hanbury (afterwards Hanbury-Kincaid-Lennox) (1827-1912): Henry William Hobhouse (1791-1868): Kedgwin Hoskins (1777-1852): Humphrey Francis Mildmay (1825-66): James King King (1806-81): Sir Robert Price, bt. (1786-1857): Robert Pulsford (1814-88): Arthur Philip Stanhope, Visct. Mahon (II) (1838-1905): Arthur Walsh (1827-1920): James Wigram (1793-1866): Willoughby (1799-1866): Alexander Hugh Baring (1835-1889): Francis Baring (1800-1868): William Bingham Baring (1799-1864): Lord Frederick John Fitzroy (1824-1919): Henry Fitzroy, earl of Euston I (1790-1863): Lord James Henry Fitzroy (1804-1834); William Henry Fitzroy, earl of Euston II (1819-1882): Sir James Flower (1794- 1850): Edward Sherlock Gooch (1802-1856): Edward Strathearn Gordon (1814-1879): Robert John Harvey Harvey (1817-1870): John Henniker-Major, 4th Bar. Henniker (1803- 1870): John Henniker-Major (1842-1902): Sir Fitzroy Edward Kelly (1796-1880): Sir Hyde Parker (1785-1856): Samuel Morton Peto (1809-1889): Robert Newton Shawe (1784-1855): Frederick Thellusson, 4th Baron Rendlesham (1798-1852): Charles Tyrell (1776-1872): Sir Charles Broke Vere (1779-1843): Edward Warner (1818-1875): Henry Wilson (1797-1866): Joshua Samuel Crompton (1799-1881): Thomas Pearson Crosland (1815-1868): Sir James Charles Dalbiac (1776-1847): John Greenwood (1829-1874): Robert Kearsley (1822-1892): Hon. Edwin Lascelles (1799-1865): Edward Aldam Leatham (1828-1900): William Overend (1809-1884): George Frederick Samuel Robinson, Viscount Goderich (1827-1909): Thomas Kitchingman Staveley (1790-1860): Reginald Arthur Vyner (1839-1870): John Ashley Warre (1787-1860): Samuel Waterhouse (1815-1881): Charles James Barnett (1798-1882): Sir William Heathcote (1801-81): Charles Wykeham Martin (1801-70): Charles Cecil Martyn (1809-66): Lord William Paget (1803-73): James Bakewell Praed (1779-1837): Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-39): William Tyringham Praed (1780-1846): Sir George Henry Rose (1770-1855): William Anderson Rose (1820-81): William Busfeild (1773-1851): William Gibson Craig (1797-1878): George Cubbitt (1828-1917): Sir John Hamilton Macgill Dalrymple (1771-1853): William Joseph Denison (1770-1849): Henry Drummond (1786-

- 15 - 1860): William John Evelyn (1822-1908): John Hardy (1773-1855): Sir John Hope (1781- 1853); Robert Milligan (1786-1862): John Remington Mills (1798-1879): Thomas Mills (1794- 1862): William John Monson (1829-1898): William Ramsay Ramsay (1809-1850): Charles St. John Fancourt (1804-?): William Henry Walter Montagu Douglas Scott, earl of Dalkeith (1831-1914): Matthew William Thompson (1820-1891): Thomas Perronet Thompson (1783- 1869): John Trotter (1781-1856): Henry Wickham Wickham (1800-1867):

25 constituencies:

County Donegal: Wexford: Bury St. Edmunds: Eye: Suffolk West: Yorkshire, East Riding: Ripon: Oxfordshire: Hampshire North: Hampshire South: East: Surrey West: County Armagh: Dungannon: Queen’s County: Elgin Burghs: Hereford: Herefordshire: Leominster: Suffolk East: Thetford: Pontefract: Bradford: Edinburghshire (Midlothian):

House of Lords 1603-1660

45 Biographies:

Richard Bourke, 1st Viscount Tunbridge and 1st earl of St Albans (c.1570-1635): John Holles, 1st earl of Clare (c.1564-1637): Edward Stourton, 10th Baron Stourton (c.1555- 1633): John Darcy, 3rd Lord Darcy (c.1579-1635): Lionel Cranfield, 1st earl of Middlesex (1575-1645): Richard Senhouse, (c.1576-1626): James Ley, 1st earl of Marlborough (c.1552-1629): Henry Ley, 2nd earl of Marlborough (1595-1638): *Roger Manwaring, bishop of St. David’s (1589/90-1653): , (1563/4- 1638): Henry Berkeley, 7th Lord Berkeley (1534-1613): *George Berkeley, 8th Lord Berkeley (1601-58): Edward Conway, 1st Viscount Conway (c.1563-1631): Edward Conway, 2nd Viscount Conway (1594-1655):* Leonard Mawe, bishop of Bath and Wells (c.1574-1629): Henry Windsor, 5th Lord Windsor (1562-1605): Thomas Windsor, 6th Lord Windsor (1591- 1641): Edward Vaux, 4th Lord Vaux of Harrowden (1588-1661): Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury (1563-1612): Edward Cromwell, 3rd Lord Cromwell (c.1557-1607): Thomas Cromwell, 4th Lord Cromwell (1594-1654):* Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex (1591- 1646):* Henry Mordaunt, 4th Lord Mordaunt (c.1568-1609): , 1st earl of Peterborough (1599-1643):* Seymour, Edward, 1st earl of Hertford (1539-1621): William Barlow, (1563/4-1613): William Chaderton, bishop of Lincoln (c.1537- 1608): Theophilus Field, bishop of Hereford (1575-1636): Richard Neile, archbishop of York (1562-1640): Henry Rowlands, (1550/1-1616): , (1530/1-1604): Thomas Arundel, 1st Lord Arundell of Wardour (c.1560-1639): Charles Blount, 1st earl of Devonshire (1563-1606): , , Bath and Wells, and (c.1574-1647):* Gray Brydges, 5th Lord Chandos (c.1579-1621): , (1572-1641):* Martin Fotherby, bishop of Salisbury (c.1560-1620): Edward Noel, 1st Lord Noel and 2nd Viscount Campden (c.1582-1643):* Christopher Roper, 2nd Lord Teynham (1562-1622): Christopher Roper, 4th Lord Teynham (1621-73):* John Roper, 1st Lord Teynham (c.1534-1618): John Roper, 3rd Lord Teynham (c.1591-1628): John Still, bishop of Bath and Wells (c.1545-1608); Thomas Howard, 21st (or 14th) earl of Arundel (1585-1646): Esmé Stuart, 1st (c.1579-1624):

House of Lords 1660-1715

5 biographies:

Heneage Finch, earl of Nottingham: Francis North, Baron Guilford: Francis North, 2nd Baron Guilford: George Savile, marquess of Halifax (1633-95): Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham

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